No Bits Per Second

People of the universe, your help is needed. Would you give a little time every day to protect the life you've come to know, and to prevent countless deaths in the future? It has come to our attention that entropy increases every day, and that the ultimate fate of the universe is to die in the roiling chaos of heat death. We may have only 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,...

At ten I have a meeting scheduled with my brother, Luis. He's an analyst for a branch of the military that doesn't hire analysts, which I assume means that he is an analyst, but works for some other branch of the government. Perhaps he's a spy. I don't know, and I am too polite to ask. He is coming to see me to discuss some details of our father's estate. At eleven we are going to have breakfast with his fiance, at which he is going to tell me that they are finally engaged. I already know this, because he told me on the phone last week, too drunk to keep his secret. I am pleased, though, because mother is secretly annoyed at having a bastard grandchild, but her sense of fair play towards her children means that she can only complain to me, not to him. The meeting is businesslike, as it must be - I am seeing him in work hours, as a client - and when it is over I walk him back to the lifts. A workman is standing there, puzzling over some wires inside the panel where t...

There is a corner of my heaven that I dread, and I stand in it now. This is the corner from which you can sometimes see me. The fur on your neck rises, you smell my ghostly scent, and you bark. Will you understand my words? I cannot come any closer, but I will try to sing to you across the years, through the fog that enshrouds you. Where should I start? Let me tell you this: religion is for children. No, that is wrong. It is for those races that are themselves children. Perhaps that is too difficult for you to see yet. I shall tell you something about this place, then. My heaven is in two parts. The first extends from the wooden fence at the back of the garden out to the road in front of the house. At the back it is two gardens wide, because once I managed to dig under the fence and get into the garden where the rabbits lived. It stretches forward through the one house, then out onto the pavement at the front, and the road. The second part is the park, connected to the first by a thin ...

(Note: This is a preview version. I'm currently writing a series of longer stories about the daughter of April Devere, and sidetracked into a couple of short stories about April herself, of which this is the first. It will eventually move onto a more permanent website, but for now, those very few reading this get a sneaky first read. Some of the speech may look a bit odd - for translated speech I'm using the typographical conventions of the language concerned, which in this case is Polish. Speech in Polish is bracketed by double-quotes like English, but the opening quotes are at the baseline of the text. Hopefully this should be fairly obvious in the text). I checked the corridor before I made my break for it - at least, that's what I told everyone afterwards. The simple truth of the matter is that after the fact it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference whether I checked it or not. I braced myself against the door and launched out into the corridor, and half a se...

Introduction Many years ago, the combined lights of maths and physics were brought to bear on music, with the result that we can now draw diagrams of the vibrations in a string and relate these diagrams to the sounds that we hear while listening to heavy metal guitar solos. Since then, these sciences have been very light in their involvement. Physics has at least proved a rich source of lyrics for They Might Be Giants, but what of maths? Has the science of numbers shot its load, musically speaking? Or does it still have something to offer? Is it time, indeed, for a comeback for this venerable institution, complete with tour shirts and sold-out stadiums? Since the old days, sad to say, one thing has become more important in music than anything else: it is, of course, no longer about experimentation, about soundscapes and art and expression. No. These days, it's the money. A band doesn't need to know their arias from their allegros to be successful - they just have to be able to ...

If you are religious one of the important things today, so it seems, is living your religion in your everyday life. Jewish folks want kosher meals in the staff canteen. Muslims want religious law in the bedroom. Christians want god-centered relationships, god-centered teaching and god-centered milk chocolates. I'd like to tell you about how I live my day religiously. At eight twenty six this morning, I honoured the spirit Stay-In-Bed-Five-More-Minutes . The ceremony is simple - the supplicant looks at his mobile phone, which he has carefully placed on the floor at the head end of his duvet. Reassured that there is still some more time before eight thirty, he closes his eyes and lowers his head to the pillow again. It is a slightly moving ceremony. The less moving it is, the better. Let me explain - I am an Inanimist. I believe that the world around us is inhabited by many spirits: the spirits of sessility, the ghosts of forsaken opportunities, the sylphs of idle moments. A thousand...

This weekend I went to see "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" with Mrs. Kludge, my mother, and my sister's family. I thought it was pretty good, although what's with the current trend of Helena Bonham-Carter only appearing in voice form? Inevitably, there were adverts. There are now five sets of adverts you'll see at any cinema if you turn up early enough. First, you'll see the static adverts that the cinema displays while people are coming in and sitting down - you know, the "5 minutes from this theatre" style of advert - although these ads seem to be more for technical colleges than Indian restaurants nowadays. Next we have the advert for the cinema itself. In some way, these adverts are the most enraging - I don't know about you, but I don't need an advert to get to come to a cinema I'm already sitting in. Nothing that I want to do that can be achieved by simply sitting on my arse needs advertising. I don't see adverts for air, for instanc...

At GE, we've discovered an inexhaustible resource. A resource that we believe could help solve the problems of an energy hungry world. It's called imagination, or rather ecomagination. I don't know, it seems to me that GE's marketing block have already pretty much exhausted their imaginations - sorry, their ecomaginations - if this is the best they can come up with. What makes this particularly odd is that it's in The Economist . I'm not entirely sure who it is that GE are advertising to. If I can just play with my Venn diagrams for a bit here, the demographic appears to be the union of the following sets: Those who read The Economist Those who care about the environment Those unable to distinguish made-up words from genuine feeling and innovation I'm fairly sure that that limits the potential audience somewhat.

I have, for many years, used Lynx deodorant. Today, as my current aerosol ran out, I remembered that I made myself a promise a few weeks ago - a promise to never ever buy anything from Lynx ever again. This might actually require no action on my part. I'm a thirty-something man, and like many thirty-something men it is difficult for people outside my immediate family to work out what I might possibly want as a birthday present. So I end up with toiletries, which for men means gift-packs of shower-gel and deodorant. Given their position as brand-leaders in Britain, I am pretty much guaranteed to get given at least one more can of Lynx deodorant before I die. ...unless I'm quick about it. The reason is adverts. Now, I'll happily admit that there are a handful of adverts around at any given time that are actually bearable in some way - either they're actually funny, or actually clever, or (rarely) actually informative. But by and large, I hate adverts. I hate the fact that...